An Investigation Into The Correlation Between Secondary School English Teacher's In-class Self-disclosure And Students' Course Interest

Firstly,although foreign studies on teacher self-disclosure have made abundant discoveries,related researches in China are rather scarce;and the discoveries on the influence of teacher self-disclosure made in studies abroad may not hold true in the Chinese context.Secondly,no previous studies have ever considered whether school difference will influence the effect of teacher self-disclosure.Thirdly,the difference between students' perception of teacher self-disclosure and the teacher's actual self-disclosure is neglected by previous studies.At last,only a few studies explore the influence of teacher self-disclosure under the context of foreign language learning.These gaps make it necessary for additional researches on teacher self-disclosure in China.Therefore,this study is intended to find out the relation between the three dimensions of teacher self-disclosure(amount,relevance and negativity)and two types of interest toward the course(situational interest and personal interest)in the foreign language learning context;meanwhile,the difference between students' perception of teacher self-disclosure and teacher's actual self-disclosure is compared.In order to find out whether the effect of teacher self-disclosure will stay the same in different schools,178 students and 4 English teachers in four classes from two different leveled high schools in Wuhan are involved in this study.The results show that among the three dimensions of students' perception of TSD,only amount has a weak positive correlation with students' personal interest,the rest two are not correlated to students' personal interest towards English,Both amount and relevance are weakly correlated to students' situational course interest and negativity does not.What's more,the correlation between amount and situational interest,between relevance and situational interest is stronger in the higher leveled school.But overall,no statistically significant difference is found between students' perception of teacher self-disclosure and teachers' actual self-disclosure though in specific schools there are.